Every-Minute Meditation

I recently spent a day at a book publishing convention, and at the Wisdom Publications booth I picked up an advanced reader’s copy of Lin Jensen’s new book, Deep Down Things: The Earth in Celebration and Dismay. It will be published in October 2010, so this amounts to a sneak preview.

After the convention, I boarded a crowded M34 bus and began making my way, with it, across town in rush hour traffic. This seemed like a fine time to browse through all the catalogs and book galleys I’d picked up. I turned through this book and was stopped by one page.

Reverend Dazui, a monk of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, encouraged the Buddhist practice of mindfulness as an antidote for a life frittered away by detail. Mindfulness as he taught it as essentially a matter of simplification. He called it “every-minute meditation” and it consisted of five steps, four of which I’ve repeated here:

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Pay attention to what you are doing.
3. When your mind wanders to something else bring it back.
4. Repeat step number three a few hundred thousand times.

“That’s all there is to it,” Reverend Dazui explained. “It’s incredibly simple and requires nothing more than the willingness to do it.”

I think that Thich Nhat Hanh would agree with these four steps. I’m not sure Thầy would characterize the process as “incredibly simple.” For Thầy, the commentary might be, “Just this. Simple, but not easy. That is why we must practice.”

Lin Jensen continues,

The willingness to do it grows with the doing, because, until you’ve tried to simplify your life in this way, you can’t really know how joyful it is to live in the present moment without the distraction of alternatives. Simplicity, as I am speaking of it here, is synonymous with clarity. If I do one thing at a time, my life will be clear and present.

Sitting on that bus, I found myself responding as if the idea of present-moment mindfulness were completely new to me. My inner response was, “But I don’t want to think about or do only one thing at a time! I like living all the alternatives at once! No other way could possibly be interesting enough to my very clever self!” This was my urban professional multi-tasking mind operating in high gear. (And no wonder, having just left a convention floor swarming with urban professional multi-tasking minds.) In that mode, I need to be persuaded that simplifying really will bring more joy and satisfaction. And I spend more time in that mode than I’d like to admit.

I realized I need to spend more time in meditation, more hours in mindfulness, even as I pull up morning glory sprouts in the garden or cut up onions and carrots in the kitchen. Sitting on that crowded, noisy, stop-and-go bus, I vowed to do it.

Back to Lin Jensen (in the same paragraph – it is a long, rich paragraph):

Simplicity, as I am speaking of it here, is synonymous with clarity. If I do one thing at a time, my life will be clear and present. … The old Chinese masters sometimes distinguished between the enlightened and the unenlightened by saying that one who is enlightened sits when he sits, stands when he stands, walks when he walks, eats when he eats, and sleeps when he sleeps. In an important way, enlightenment is simply being present in whatever one happens to be doing at the moment.

Right now, then, I am practicing being present to my thinking, present to my memories of the M34 bus, present to my typing, present to my sitting, present to noting the tension in my shoulders, arms, and hands from typing, present to my mind weighing different ways of wording what I am typing, present to my efforts to touch what it is that I wanted to say, what brought me to the keyboard in the first place. And present to what I had no idea I would say.

I was curious about what Reverend Dazui’s fifth step was. At the website of an Order of Buddhist Contemplatives practice center, I found the five steps expressed this way:

1. Do one thing at a time.
2. Pay full attention to what you are doing.
3. When your mind wanders to something else, bring it back.
4. Repeat step number three a few hundred thousand times.
5. And, when your mind keeps wandering to the same thing over and over, stop for a minute and pay attention to the "distraction": maybe it is trying to tell you something.

Practicing with distraction – that requires a whole n’other post – or maybe a few hundred thousand posts.

From Wisdom Publications:

LIN JENSEN is the critically acclaimed author of the memoir Bad Dog! A Memoir of Love, Beauty, and Redemption in Dark Places and Pavement: Reflections on Mercy, Activism, and Doing "Nothing" for Peace, a fearless and funny account of curbside social action. He is also the author of Together Under One Roof: Making a Home of the Buddha’s Household. … He is the founding teacher and senior teacher emeritus of the Chico Zen Sangha, in Chico, California, where he lives with his wife.

Rev. Master Daizui MacPhillamy

1945 - 2003

He was the Head of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives, and also acted as Prior of a small mountain temple, the Fugen Forest Hermitage, in northwestern California.

“The Order of Buddhist Contemplatives is dedicated to the practice of the Serene Reflection Meditation tradition, known as Ts'ao-Tung Ch'an in China and Sōtō Zen in Japan. … The practice of the Order emphasizes serene reflection meditation, mindfulness in daily life, and adherence to the Buddhist Precepts.”

The Mindful Mouthful

In Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition, we are invited to recite The Five Contemplations before every meal. There have been several versions over the years; here is the most recent:

The Five Contemplations

This food is a gift of the earth, the sky, numerous living beings and much hard and loving work.

May we eat with mindfulness and gratitude so as to be worthy to receive it.

May we recognize and transform our unwholesome mental formations, especially our greed, and learn to eat with moderation.

May we keep our compassion alive by eating in such a way that we reduce the suffering of living beings, preserve our planet and reverse the process of global warming.

We accept this food so that we may nurture our sisterhood and brotherhood, strengthen our sangha and nourish our ideal of serving all beings.

I confess I don't recite this, unless I am on retreat with others in this tradition. It has never engendered in me the kind of humble appreciation that I think I'm supposed to experience. It is based on a teaching that the Buddha gave, which is recorded, I learned, in the Sramanera Vinaya, or rules of conduct for novices. I wasn't able to track down a translation, but I found this summary by Ronald Epstein.

Five Contemplations While Eating

1. I think about where the food came from and the amount of work necessary to grow the food, transport it, prepare and cook it and bring it to the table.

2. I contemplate my own virtuous nature. Is it sufficient to merit receiving the food as offering?

3. I guard my mind against transgression, the principal ones being greed and so forth.

4. I realize that food is a wholesome medicine that heals the sufferings of the body.

5. I should receive the food offerings only for the sake of realizing the Way.

Every version and commentary I read referred to the importance of guarding against greed. Some emphasized that the food should be considered only as medicine for the body, and one should eat only enough to ward off physical weakness. Personally, perhaps because of a history of issues around eating, I find it not useful to dwell on whether or not I deserve to eat, or on whether greed is getting the better of me. I do find it helpful to think of food as medicine (but not only as medicine).

But what I find most useful of all is, instead, to recite (silently) the gatha for the First Four Mouthfuls. Here, Thay has fleshed out the idea of taking in food for the sake of the practice by inviting us to develop the Four Heavenly Abodes (the Brahmaviharas) as we eat. These four immeasurable virtues are Lovingkindness, Compassion, Joy (or Sympathetic Joy), and Equanimity.

The First Four Mouthfuls

With the first mouthful, I vow to practice loving kindness.
With the second, I vow to help relieve the suffering of others.
With the third, I vow to see others’ joy as my own.
With the fourth, I vow to learn the way of non-attachment and equanimity.

One evening, the night of a sangha tea ceremony, during which we eat and drink tea mindfully together, the facilitators came up with a new formulation. With the first mouthful, we were invited to nourish our capacity for lovingkindness. With each mouthful, we nourished an aspect of ourselves. This resonated so beautifully for me that that is how I now recite it.

Recently, at a small, mostly-sangha gathering, I offered to lead the group in taking the first four mouthfuls together. In order not to exclude anyone who might find the Four Immeasurable Terms rather foreign, I came up with yet another formulation, which went something like this:

With the first mouthful, we nourish our capacity for lovingkindness, a universal friendliness toward all beings.

With the second mouthful, we nourish our capacity for compassion, the desire and ability to ease suffering.

With the third mouthful, we nourish our capacity for sympathetic joy, the ability to find happiness in others' happiness.

With the fourth mouthful, we nourish our capacity for equanimity, the ability to accept life just as it is, this very moment.

May you be so nourished.

















P.S. This is a slice of sorghum bread I made; for once, a successful batch of gluten-free bread. I'm learning ...